Are you still of the old SEO mindset? It’s time to wake up because the world of SEO has evolved a great deal over the last couple of years. You need to prioritise the search engine optimisation process of your website to achieve the desired results.

If you wish to enhance the SEO health of your website, here is the checklist that talks about 8 important SEO steps that are a must.

1. Install Google analytics
Google Analytics is the most widely used search analytics tool in the world. It also assists you in tracking how much traffic your website draws from search engines; the average session time; the bounce rate and many other important metrics. You can also gain better understanding of your visitors’ behaviour and take suitable steps for improving the performance of your website.

2. Add your website to Google search console
You can analyse many factors affecting your search traffic with the help of Google Search Console. This platform also makes you aware of broken links in your website or any penalty that could be imposed for violating the Google guidelines. Once you know the reason behind these issues, you can submit your website to Google for reconsideration. Apart from this, you can also learn about any other technical or SEO related issues such as duplicate content, search rankings data, visibility and CTR.

3. Check your websites speed
Page load speed is an important ranking factor for Google search engine algorithm. If your website page load speed goes down, you may lose both rankings and potential customers. You can run a test with the Google PageSpeed Insights tool to check how your website performs on this critical parameter. Ensure that your website scores above 85 for both mobile and desktop.

4. Create and upload a sitemap.xml in search console
Submitting the site index of your website to Google and Bing is important. It helps search engine crawlers to understand the site structure of your website and help them find new content faster. So, check whether your site is properly indexed in Google or not. You’ll see this information when using the Google Search Console.

5. Run an SEO check for these errors
SEO related errors can affect your search ranking. So, fixing them should be your priority. Below is the checklist that should be followed to fix some common errors:

Use Manual actions in Search Console for figuring out if Google has penalised your site

Check the Google Search Console for fixing any 404 Errors

Use Robots.txt testing tool to find out any errors in your Robots.txt file

6. Ensure title and meta descriptions are properly optimised
Make sure your website page title is properly optimised. It should not be more than 60-65 characters. The page title should begin with the most relevant keyword. The number of characters in the meta description should be around 155-160 characters.

7. Make sure your important resources are crawlable
Google can render pages like modern browsers, which makes all kinds of resources such as CSS and JavaScript crawlable. What does this mean? It means that if your JS or CSS is not crawlable, Google would not index the dynamically generated content of your site. The problem will be more confounding if your site heavily relies on AJAX or JavaScript. Since this is a complex issue, you can hire a reliable agency for your help.

8. Make your CMS properly equipped
Ensure that your CMS is equipped with a good SEO plugin that allows you to write the title, the description, the image tags, the header tags and the page tags. If you use WordPress as we predominantly do Yoast and All In One SEO are very good, and are the most used SEO plugins in the industry. Yoast has a great feature where it also assesses the SEO score of your articles for you.

Conclusion
If you’re keen on enhancing the SEO health of your website, the above checklist will be extremely helpful. You should, however, know that SEO is not just limited to technical optimisation. It’s also about providing engaging content to your end users. However, having a superior technical SEO capability will make your website rank higher.